Category: Miscellaneous

Homo Sausage

May 30, 2009

Have you worked out the method of my blog titles yet? If not, here’s a hint:

< Yes, it’s true

The rain had lessened, so yesterday we switched back to our plan for Friday, which was Asakusa followed by Odaiba. We left the inn early and walked through the Yanaka area to Ueno station, stopping at Denny’s (of all places!) on the way for breakfast.

< Oishi!

The spaghetti was outrageously good, meaty and flavoursome with a nice density to the noodles. We will probably eat breakfast here again! The Yanaka area is an interesting (possibly) upper class part of Tokyo, with modernish homes packed into an area where there always seems to be a shrine or temple or graveyard within a couple of blocks. One day soon we’ll go for more of an exploratory walk, so I’ll post a couple of picks then.

By the way, we saved 243 photos from yesterday alone. It’s quite a task choosing 20 or so for the daily blog post, and I apologize if I am favouring the eccentric over the scenic 🙂

Asakusa is famous for Senso-Ji temple and a large gate called the Thunder Gate. We’ve been here before, although not for five years. It’s perhaps the most popular part of the city for foreign tourists as well.

Running from the gate to the temple is a (famous) shopping street called Nakamise-Dori. Actually most of the entire surrounding area is packed with souvenir shops of all shapes and sizes, selling such things as traditional Japanese crafts, foods and clothing. The rightmost image above is of me standing in front of one (of many) stores specializing in a particular type of rice cracker. Many stores also make a type of pastry stuffed with flavoured cream, often in special shapes:

And yes, those are Obama cakes at the end 🙂

The main Senso-Ji temple is not very scenic right now, being covered as it is with scaffolding for what looks like some roof maintenance. Tourists are still allowed inside though, and we purchased out customary fortunes to see what life held for us:

Mine is on the left, and KLS’s is on the right! If you get a bad one (and could hers be worse?) you are supposed to twist it up and tie it onto a tree near the temple, to eventually be burned in the hope it becomes good. She kept hers though, since she’s “not superstitious” 🙂

And this is a photo of a fake bowl of rice, used a model to give potential customers an idea what the food you serve is like (99% of restaurants here use such things):

< Looks good, eh?

The city has also seemed to have undertaken an incentive to stop people from smoking while walking. Yes, you read that correctly! Signage such as these are common everywhere now:

Asakusa is the northernmost stop on the ferry that travels the Sumida river through Tokyo. We hopped on this boat and rode it all the way to Odaiba, the reclaimed land entertainment complex (think a much bigger Darling Harbour).

The main reason to come here was to ride the Great Wheel ferris wheel, which I did. But we had to eat first, and what could be better than a burger at a translocated Hawaiin chain?

The third image above? Yep, a performing monkey. A Japanese Macaque (sp?) to be precise. It’s not a trip to Japan without seeing a performing ape.

This was occuring just outside of Muscle Park, which is a ‘theme park’ devoted to the Fuji TV shows such as Monster Box and Sasuke (aka Ninja Warrior in the USA). For about $14 one could attempt a (smaller) recreation of the Ninja Warrior course in an effort to impress one’s girlfriend. We watched a guy try, and fail miserably. Not surprising since the second obstacle was the Wall Hang and the third was a Salmon Climb!

The complex named Pallette Town on Odaiba also has the biggest arcade I have ever seen. Again, I’m saving a lot of arcade photos for a dedicated post, but suffice to say this place is basically a warehouse stuffed with games. Hundreds of them, in all shapes and sizes. It’s awesome in the literal sense of the word.

The rightmost photo above is making Adam’s eyes boggle. It shows over a hundred gashapon machines in a row, and was less than half of the total in this arcade. For anywhere from Y100 to Y500 you get a little ball out with a toy inside, and the offerings range from little garbage things for kids to highly detailed models for collectors. If anything, they seem even more common in Japan now than ever, and we’re constantly stopping to see what wonders are on offer!

Here’s a video of me playing an interesting Whack-A-Mole game!

Oh, and here’s a naked guinea pig:

Handsome little devil isn’t he? And a bargain at only $355!

Dinner was chicken yakitori on cold rice, with cake for desert. The bakery near here (Kobe Kotobukiya again) has such wonderful offerings, presented with such perfection it brings a tear to my eye. As always, I sucked down a slice of strawberry shortcake. Maybe one day I’ll buy an entire cake!

McHotDog Mega Sausage

May 29, 2009

We woke so early yesterday! Our internal clocks have still not set themselves fully to JP time, so we were up and ready to start the day hours before the rest of this country was! It was raining in the AM as we left (at 6 o’clock) with our destination Asakusa. A lazy walk through Yanaka towards Ueno led us to Yamashiroya for breakfast.

< Yum!

Yes, beef bowl for breakfast. It was, of course, delicious, and I can assure those that have eaten at the chain elsewhere in the world that the JP version is far, far superior. We chose this place mostly because very few others (including coffee shops) were even open! Happily, it ended up being a great breakfast choice. JBF may want to know that, sadly, the Jonathons has closed…

Ueno park was quiet and very wet. We’ll be back here in on a sunnier day!

We hopped on a train to Asakusa (a few minutes away from Ueno on the Ginza line) and walked around the quiet streets for a while as the rain phased between hardly there and quite heavy. Much of the sights in this part of the city are outdoors, and we realized that it was wiser to change our plans to something more rain-friendly, and with that, at around 9, hopped on the train again with our destination Nakano Broadway mall in a suburb of the city named Nakano.

Nakano is one of Tokyo’s foremost otaku shopping destinations, and although we were perhaps expecting our descent into otakudom would wait a few days it would necessarily begin yesterday!

To the left you can see a Star Wars pachinko machine. The balls drop through the metal pins around and to the left of the video screen in the middle (where Yoda is). It’s hard to appreciate how interesting this device is from a single photo, but even so I didn’t play it. There still seems to be, in my mind, some sort of wall I must surpass to play pachinko! The other 2 shots are me playing Death Smiles 2, the (very) new Cave bullet-hell shooter. It was great, and I will play it again this trip!

Nakano is an interesting place. It’s as close to a traditional mall as we are used to in the US (or Australia), which itself is rare in Japan. And yet the ground floors are the usual food/clothing/etc shops and the upper floors (there are 4) are absolutely inundated with otaku shops selling games, manga, anime, model kits, all manner of weird toys and collectibles.

At most of these photography is forbidden, and I tried to observe that, but even so I managed to snap a few shots of particularly interesting stuff:

The leftmost photo shows an item I would so love to purchase! The legendary 1:1 scale Keroro Gunso action figure. A steal at $105 but big and heavy enough to make transporting it difficult (to say the least). Hrm… could I think of something I wonder? The middle shot shows the window display of one of the several cosplay stores in Nakano. These places sell premade (and highly detailed) costumes for dress-up purposes (to those assuming lewd intent – cosplay is the act of dressing up as characters from games and anime and is a wholesome and long-standing hobby in Japan). As you may imagine the employees of these stores are all cosplaying themselves, and maid outfits seemed popular yesterday. The rightmost figure is of Ulquiorra (sp?) from Bleach, or a ~15cm figure of him that stole our hearts briefly yesterday!

We made lots of purchases. Toys and cards and an astoundingly detailed and discounted Neo ZX-Tole figure from Guyver and even the most expensive PSP game I have ever bought (or will buy) – Wizardry Empire III (for ~$65). KLS bought a magazine that came with a free Le Sportsac purse. I bought a super sized Mt Dew to chase the last of the jetlag demons away!

< Went down well

Lunch was a Japanese restaurant at which KLS ordered chicken tonkatsu (aka ‘schnitzel’) on cold Udon noodles and I ordered grilled ‘Alaskan Salmon’. The fish was delicious but (amusingly and obviously in retrospect) full of bones which were tricky to remove with chopsticks alone!

< I didn’t eat the condiments!

Here are some more random shots from Nakano:

The leftmost shot is me failing to be as handsome as Bae Yong Joon from Winter Sonata (we’ve seen his face more than a few times already this trip). Here he is obviously selling glasses. The middle shot, taken in a drugstore, shows a range of hair dye for women branded with art by Ai Yazawa, creators of Nana and Paradise Kiss, amongst others. Many products sold in stores here use manga-style art on the packaging, and more than a few carry art by famous creators. The rightmost shot was taken in a bookstore and shows a piece of original art by Takeshi Obata. Although I can’t read the text, my guess it is some sort of thankyou to the store for selling a zillion copies of Death Note (from which these characters are taken). Such art is relatively common in shops here that sell manga, and it’s always a thrill to see when the artist is one we follow.

We spent hours at Nakano before heading back to the Ryokan to drop off our booty and go out again, this time to Ueno, for dinner and further exploration. It was fairly late now and night had fallen, so after a visit to the mega toy store Yamashiroya we had some quick KFC for dinner before visiting many game centers.

Intriguingly, although Sega seems to have closed their massive Joypolis complex in Ueno, many more arcades have sprung up including a fancy new Taito one (heavily branded with Space Invaders imagery). I’ll talk more about arcades in a future post (oh the sites I have seen!) but here’s a preview:

That gargantuan device on the left is one of those machines where you throw tokens in at a pile of tokens in an attempt to knock them into the collection bin. Yep, that’s all it is, although as you can see this one (called Galileo) is massive, multi-player and astounding in an impossible-machinish kind of way. The rightmost shot is me playing (selecting my character actually) Konami’s super high-rez Gradius spiritual successor named ‘Otomedius’ and featuring art by Mine Yoshizaki (Keroro Gunso mangaka). The game is awesome and I will certainly go back and play it again!

< KLS!

Nothing more than a lovely shot of KLS there.

I’ll end this post with two examples of the subtlety of the Japanese marketing machine:

The leftmost photo are weight loss pills. The rightmost image, taken in a KFC, is… well it’s sort of undefendably isn’t it? 🙂

King Of Mango

May 28, 2009

Almost 4am Friday here, and we’re wide awake… so how was yesterday you wonder?

The flight to Detroit was short and sweet, and although our layover was lengthy (over 5 hours) looking back it didn’t seem so bad. The airport is large and vaguely interesting, so we explored and ate and played DS (FFCC2) while waiting.

< Omelette

Good thing we did eat as well, since the plane food was swill I wouldn’t feed a dying dog. The 3-shrimp cocktail set a new low for “how dare they feed us that?”

< Ugh (but I ate 2!)

The flight to Japan was unusual for 2 reasons. Firstly, there were very few westerners on the plane (which was a 2 story monster, and very full). Secondly, the last 2 hours or so were AWFUL due to turbulence so bad they had to cancel a meal (small loss probably). I was sitting in my seat fighting off the urge to vomit for almost 2 hours! And yes, this was my first time getting motion sickness on a plane 🙂

We had to fill out a special flu form, and after landing 2 ‘health inspectors’ boarded the plane for what seemed like the least enthusiastic inspection ever. Both of them looked like college students as well, with 1000 places they’d prefer being. However once we disembarked, we noticed that about 99% of our plane was actually continuing to either China or Korea!

Narita airport was DEAD AS A DOORNAIL! JBF – you can appreciate this. The customs and immigration lines were nonexistent (zero wait). We waited zero time for our luggage, and zero time to exchange currency. Compare to previous trips where it may have taken an hour or so between disembarking and getting through customs – here it was 3 or 4 minutes!

I was overjoyed, since I hate airports.

Oh, and here’s a shot of the controls of the buttock-cleaning toilet I used at the airport.

< Clean the buttocks!

We took the fancy electric train Skyliner to Nippori station and walked down to our ryokan. Even at this time (on the train) it seemed unreal that we were here (the whole ease of travel these days can do that…). But KLS was overjoyed to drink her first coffee from a machine.

The second shot is out the window of the train, and shows a typical view of Japan just east of Tokyo. Rice fields intersperced with towns. As you can see it was raining, and will be until Saturday. No worries, since our plans for the first few days include mostly indoor places.

Dinner was McDonalds! We were constrained by the need to eat quickly, and by the fact Yoshinoya was jam packed with salarymen. But the food was good (heck it was ambrosiac!), including KLS Bacon-Lettuce Burger

We then wandered the neighbourhood (JBF, the Ginza shopping street is mostly unchanged, although the clear area to the left of the stairs where the cats used to sit is now a large apartment building!) and laid in vittles for our room fridge. This would include, of course, Mt Dew, Kit-Kats, Chip Stars, Water etc.

Kobe Kotobukiya provided delicious deserts we enjoyed in our room later.

Strawberry On The Shortcake Baby!